World Cup 2 – Andorra

All the travelling and racing up in Scotland over the last 2 weeks took its toll on me and I started getting a sore throat. Unfortunately that developed into a cold just in time for the week in Andorra. Also after 2 lovely dry weeks of riding the weather was not looking so good for Andorra this week. We arrived into Toulouse in the pouring rain and then drove the whole way to Andorra in the rain…not a good start for the week. Apparently it had been raining for 2 weeks and was not forecast to stop ! Fortunately the forecast proved to be wrong and we had 3 fairly dry days during practice.

The track was not what I expected after driving through huge mountains on the drive to reach the race. It was as short as a regional UK race with almost as little elevation, but however looked like it would be a lot of fun to ride. It started off on the piste with a series of flat turns followed by some switchbacks. It then dropped into the wood and then traversed across the forest taking in a few rocks and roots along the way. I thought it was my cold that was making it feel really hard to get my breath after only 1 min of riding, but then I realised that we were at some serious altitude and that was not helping things ! It was a really physical track with a lot of pedalling which was only made worse before the race by a couple of wet nights which made the track muddy and really rutted. It ended up drying a lot throughout the race day making the track more and more tacky and harder work to keep your speed.

Although I was not feeling the best I really started to feel better on my bike this week and felt like I was starting to ride quick enough to get a decent result. I made a few mistakes and caught the person in front of me on my qualifying run but still qualified in 3rd, so I was pretty happy with that. My final run was going ok till the last wood section where I came to a complete halt in one of the last muddy ruts and lost a load of speed. I ended up dropping a place and finished the race in 4th. Rachel Atherton once again showed her form to take another impressive win, with Sabrina Jonnier in 2nd, Florian Pugin in 3rd and myself in 4th. Although not happy to be so far off the pace, I felt like I made some big improvements this week and hope it improve upon this next weekend when the world cup heads home to Fort William.